The BEAM's runtime operates within a containerized VM. It is never going to catch up to systems level language for perf. This is even harder to do when you take into account things like hot code loading. That feature isn't going to get dropped just for operational speed. You don't always need that speed though. Then again you don't always need the guardrails of the BEAM either. @dhh's point here is that within like a day or two he had his app re-written to go 50x faster for what, $20? People are getting so hung up on defending their turf they have completely missed the bigger picture.